What is Software Studies?
Is it an intellectual movement, a paradigm, a school or field? According to the Software Studies Initiative directors Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip-Fruin it is whatever we want it to be. It is what it is already but it is now getting an official name with the recently published book. The Software Studies lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller, is coming out with MIT Press this month and marks a milestone in the field. Unfortunately Matthew Fuller, from Goldsmiths College, University of London was not able to attend to attend the meeting in California but the people present represented a wide variety of interests.

MIT Press was represented by Doug Sery who is involved with the MIT Software Studies series. Through these series MIT wishes to direct the discussion and with their Platform Studies series they want to provide a complementary insight into the field of computing, software and hardware. One of the questions that arises is where is the place of webware? Does it belong to platform studies or software studies? Another issue that we need to address is how we can use, create and learn from new modes of knowledge formation that go beyond books. How do we make, use and contribute to the growing field of software studies besides the official MIT series?

The Software Studies Initiative presented their first plan on establishing a central platform for researchers, students, engineers and everyone interested in the state of software studies. One way to accomplish this is to form an aggregation channel where everything produced will be aggregated in one central place. This may be done by using the "software_studies" tag when publishing your related work on Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, blogs, etc. We are participating in the discourse by tagging which in itself is a technological strategy. The tools we use as both an object of study and to document our studies are going to be very diverse and on top of that we are people who switch tools often. This is why tagging was chosen as one of the main ways to aggregate content because tagging is a meta practice and usually independent of the type of tool. A first aggregation prototype was made by Jeremy Douglass in Yahoo Pipes.

However, when tagging "user generated content" such as blog posts or videos one has to be aware of the both the tag and the field. As a fairly new and emerging field that is in the process of shaping itself there will be a lot of people doing interesting research related to a field they are not aware of. I think one of the key objects should also be expanding the awareness of the field where the Software Studies lexicon is playing a leading role.

An important step in further shaping and expanding the field is an international approach. The first Software Studies Workshop was held at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, the Netherlands in 2006. This second workshop at the University of San Diego attracted mostly people from the United States from UCSD & UCSC but also people from MIT, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Maryland, etc. International representation included Tristan Thielmann from the University of Siegen, Germany, Cicero Silva from FILE, Brazil and myself. Silva recently opened the Software Studies Brazil at the FILE lab and translated a section of the Software Studies Portal into Portugese.

With the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, the University of Amsterdam and the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, Goldsmiths College in London a European branch is unofficially present as well. It would be interesting to see what is happing in Scandinavia, Germany, Italy and Spain for example. Another interesting direction to explore would be China but due to language and cultural barriers this may be a step too far too soon.

The main communal feature of this group is technical engagement. This also raised the reoccurring question of digital literacy or, should we all know (and teach) how to program? Personally I do not consider myself a coder. I once called myself a passive coder as a way to illustrate that I can read bits of code and write new code through the practice of copy and pasting but I am not an active coder in the sense that I can write code from scratch. In this age of appropriation, copy-pasting I think it is important to know your object of study, which in the case of software will often involve knowing code, but interpreting code and writing code are two different things. Digital literacy to me means to understand code, not to be able to produce code (although I wish I could but that is another issue.)

A final question that was addressed in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) meeting room was that we are located in the heart of where things get made. In California a lot of the objects we study gets made and how do we establish relations with for example Google and Yahoo? How do we establish more open and fluid relations with those who produce our objects of study?

The University of California in San Diego (UCSD) organized a two day event in order to pioneer the emerging field of Software Studies. The first day was a public event titled SoftWhere 2008 which consisted of over fifteen short presentation in Pecha Kucha style. The second day consisted of a closed strategic session that dealt with more formal questions on the shaping of a new field of studies and will be discussed in a follow-up blog post.

SoftWhere 2008
The title of the workshop 'SoftWhere' embodies the question of demarcating an area of study. Our current society is penetrated by and shaped by software and should thus be subject to appropriate critique. The ubiquity of software has led to a software culture and we are now living in a software society. What does it mean to live in such a software society instead of an industrial society? A world which is created by software is opaque and that is why we need to study software. We should question the streams behind, embedded in and woven through our society and look at what is happening behind the screens. SoftWhere? SoftEverywhere!

The Software Studies workshop was organized by UCSD and most of the participants were either from the University of California in San Diego or Irvine or Los Angeles. Participants were asked to prepare a short presentation preferably in Pecha Kucha style.

Jeremy Douglass, the first Software Studies Initiative postdoc, was strictly timing our presentations as each of us had either exactly seven minutes or if you followed the Pecha Kucha style of 20 seconds for 20 slides six minutes and fourty seconds. It turned out to be a great format to listen to almost twenty presentations in just one afternoon. Douglass was a great timekeeper, or rather his iPhone stopwatch that made an alarming sound after seven minutes forcing some speakers to cut their story short. In Jeremy's own apologetic words: "It's not me, it's the software."

The presentations showed the diverse perspectives on software and software culture. The diversity of approaches and topics in the research may serve as an intellectual map of the people present. They may also serve to determine a common ground in the extremely diverse approaches to software studies. Liz Losh from Virtualpolitik wrote an extensive post on the "speed dating" Pecha Kucha presentations.

Critical storage studies
The presentations showed the diverse approaches to studying software and they also served as a showcase of the current state of research into software. However, some presentations did not deal with studies of software itself but also with the questions surrounding the field of software studies. Matthew Kirschenbaum for example talked about preservation as software studies, or what he would jokingly refer to as critical storage studies. Critical X Studies is a term used by Bill Benzon who at first was skeptical about the new field of Critical Code Studies:

While I tend to be skeptical of any enterprise whose name takes the form “Critical X Studies,” where X is the domain under investigation, there’s certainly room to look at the cultural production of computer code and the styles of computer languages and programs.

What Kirschenbaum is referring to with critical storage studies is the fact that without preservation there is no field. If we want to establish and maintain a new field of Software Studies we should also look at the preservation of software. Emulators are only one way of thinking about storage and keeping software 'alive' because we are dealing with a hybrid cultural heritage. This is illustrated 'the Preserving Virtual Worlds Project' that Kirschenbaum is currently working on.

Taxonomy of Software Studies
Critical Code Studies is just one of the many fields bordering or moving into the field of Software Studies. Mark Marino presented the pitfalls embodied within the metaphor of Critical X Studies as described by Liz Losh. However, these different fields that at some points overlap and form different layers of software form the grounds of Bogost's taxonomy of Software Studies consisting of five levels:

1. Reception/operation
2. Interface
3. Form/function
4. Code
5. Platform

While this is not a definite taxonomy of the field it does present a useful way to think of how the existing overlapping fields operate. In this taxonomy Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost's new book series Platform Studies is seen as complimentary to Software Studies. We are approaching different layers of software through both a philosophical and critical practice that may entail either the study of code or the other things (cultural studies). Part of software studies itself is turning it inside-out:

What are we looking at if we study software? Which layers do we need to address and which questions and fields have previously addressed similar issues? These questions were part of the second day of the Software Studies workshop which dealt with the typical What, Where, When and How questions and will be addressed in a next post.

This is the first post in a series on the Software Studies Workshop at UCSD and the Software Studies Panel at the HASTAC II Conference at UCI and UCLA. Please subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up with our updates.